Edwards Not Guilty on One Count; Mistrial on Five Others

John Edwards outside the federal courthouse in Greensboro, N.C., with his daughter Cate on Thursday.Credit
Travis Dove for The New York Times

GREENSBORO, N.C. — When former Senator John Edwards, a man who reached for the presidency while scrambling to hide a pregnant mistress, heard on Thursday that a federal jury would not convict him on the six corruption charges he faced, he fell back in his chair and closed his eyes.

For just a moment, the man whose most intimate sexual details, lies and bare political ambition had been aired for nearly six weeks in a federal trial, looked as if he might cry.

Yes, he said as he left the courtroom, he had sinned.

“I did an awful, awful lot that was wrong,” he said. “I am responsible. I don’t have to go any further than the mirror. It’s me and me alone.”

But he was not guilty of using campaign funds to hide those sins, he said.

Certainly, Mr. Edwards has lost in the court of public opinion. But on Thursday he was vindicated, for the moment, by a jury of mostly working class North Carolinians who could not reach a verdict on the five charges of campaign finance fraud and conspiracy he faced.

They acquitted him on one, which was based on a $200,000 check that the heiress Rachel Mellon had written him in January 2008, the month he dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination for president. The result was seen as a setback for the Justice Department’s public integrity section, the watchdog agency that has struggled to rebuild itself.

The Justice Department offered no indication on whether it would retry Mr. Edwards.

Unless it decides to do so, the verdict and mistrial end one of the most scandalous chapters in the history of presidential campaigning, weaving in a hidden child, an ambitious would-be first lady dying of cancer, secret money from ultrarich supporters and legal scrutiny of the laws that regulate how money given to candidates for office can be used.

It is unlikely that the verdict will help politicians better interpret the labyrinth of campaign finance law or lead to more gifts to candidates, said Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the University of California, Irvine. “This is not going to open up a free-for-all where you’re going to have the ‘super-PAC’ billionaires giving large ‘gifts’ to their candidate friends.” He noted that the Federal Election Commission has made it clear that it looks critically upon the practice unless there has been a pattern of gift-giving unrelated to campaigns, as with Ms. Mellon to Mr. Edwards.

If he were advising candidates, he said, “I would encourage them to be extremely cautious so as not to get caught up in something which could cause an overzealous prosecutor to try to make a name for himself or herself.”

The government contended that Mr. Edwards used about $1 million to finance a complex scheme to keep Rielle Hunter, a former campaign videographer with whom he began an extramarital affair in 2006, from his wife and the public while he pursued the presidency.

The charges were based on how he handled money from Fred Baron, a wealthy Texas lawyer who was Mr. Edward’s finance chairman, and Mrs. Mellon, now 101, an heiress to pharmaceutical and banking fortunes with connections to the Kennedy family.

The jurors, who had deliberated for nine days, were escorted to their cars by federal marshals without comment.

Judge Catherine C. Eagles cautioned them against speaking with the news media or even reading or watching much of the coverage for the next few days, saying they would need some time to reconnect with their families.

As she had been through the length of the trial, Judge Eagles was solicitous as she said goodbye. “You can hold your head up,” she said.

Later, in a brief interview, one juror said “it was real divided” when asked about the deliberations. She and another juror were at the Charlotte, N.C., airport, on their way to New York for a morning TV appearance.

The jurors came to the judge with a note around 2 p.m. on Thursday saying they had a verdict. The next half-hour was as tense as it had been since testimony began on April 23. Mr. Edwards sat with eyes forward, virtually expressionless. His daughter Cate, who sat behind him for the entire trial, twirled her hair, her foot jiggling. Next to her were his parents, Wallace and Bobbie Edwards, who huddled close and held hands.

Then, after the judge had to send the jury back to their deliberation room to clarify what they meant when they said they had reached a verdict on one count but not the others, they returned and a mistrial was declared.

Mr. Edwards, 58, who by this time knew the tide had turned in his direction, smiled broadly and hugged Cate, then his parents and his legal team.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In front of scores of cameras outside the courtroom, he thanked his family, expressed love for his daughter Cate, 30, who like her father is a lawyer; his other two children, who are school age; as well as his son Wade, who died in a car accident in 1996 when he was 16.

And to the surprise of many, he expressed his love for the daughter he had with Ms. Hunter, “my precious Quinn,” whom “I love more than any of you could ever imagine.”

From the start, when The National Enquirer broke the story that Mr. Edwards had been having an affair, the tale of a family torn apart had been nothing less than cinematic in scope.

The government contended that Ms. Mellon, using a North Carolina interior decorator as a go-between, sent $725,000 to an Edwards aide for what she knew only as a personal problem.

That problem was Ms. Hunter, whose relationship with Mr. Edwards became increasingly apparent to his aides and his wife, Elizabeth, as he traveled with Ms. Hunter around the country campaigning for the Democratic nomination.

Mr. Edwards, prosecutors contended, came up with a scheme. Andrew Young, an aide whom campaign staffers often made fun of as an unreliable Edwards sycophant, would claim paternity, then Mr. Baron would send them underground.

The expensive cross-country odyssey began in December 2007, just before the Iowa caucuses and two months before Ms. Hunter gave birth to their daughter.

Mr. Edwards dropped out of the race in January 2008, and continued to deny the affair until he went public in an ABC interview just before the Democratic nominating convention. But he lied there, too, claiming the affair was over and brief. The interview was the last piece of evidence presented by the prosecution.

Mrs. Edwards, meanwhile, was waging a public battle with cancer and a private battle with Mr. Edwards, who finally, in January 2010, admitted that Quinn — whose full name is Frances Quinn Hunter — was his child. Mrs. Edwards died in December 2010.

In a case that had no precedent, the Department of Justice began an investigation aimed at proving Mr. Edwards conspired to secretly use the money to influence the outcome of his presidential bid in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act, accepting contributions that exceeded campaign finance limits, and causing his campaign to file a false financial disclosure report.

He was indicted in June 2011.

Campaign finance law is ever changing and being reinterpreted, with this case falling on one central question: Were the donations for the sole purpose of influencing the campaign or merely one purpose.

Mr. Edwards’s defense centered largely on the argument that the money was simply a way for friends to help him hide the affair from Mrs. Edwards, a woman described during testimony as “volcanic,” who once got so distraught she ripped off her shirt and bra in front of staff members and screamed, “You don’t see me anymore!” at Mr. Edwards.

The defense team, led by Abbe Lowell, spent much of its time on court attacking Mr. Young as a liar who siphoned much of the money to build a dream house and to take trips.

Prosecutors tried to show that Mr. Young and his family were pawns in a game of deception orchestrated by Mr. Edwards.

Mr. Edwards remains free to raise his children, visit Ms. Hunter and Quinn in Charlotte, practice law and ponder the arc of a career that brought him close to the presidency and then, in the end, crashing back down. “I don’t think God’s through with me,” he said “I really believe he thinks there’s still some good things I can do.”

Bill Dupre contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Edwards Acquitted on One Count; Mistrial on 5 Others. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe